Sustainability assessment of ship energy systems at the design phase : integrating environmental and economic aspects

Sustainable development of the shipping sector is becoming increasingly important for policy, decisions makers, as well as, academia. A gap in assessing the sustainability of ship systems exists, even though the ship energy systems have the major environmental and economic impacts over the vessel’s operational lifetime. The purpose of this paper is to present the status of sustainability assessment in the shipping sector and introduce a method that can facilitate the integrated assessment of environmental and economic sustainability of ship systems lifetime at the design phase, by taking into consideration the operational and regulatory requirements of the vessel